Past

Yvette Brackman: Agit Flight

14 Nov 2014 – 10 Jan 2015

Based on the artist’s own family history and their experience as Jews during the Soviet regime, the exhibition unfolds as a choreography charting the complex story of war, anti- Semitism, persecution and exile – but also flexibility, adaptability, transformation and mobility.

As a basis for the exhibition, in collaboration with the authors Gitte Broeng and Suzi Tucker, Brackman has written a play exhibited in newspaper format. The text is based on the futuristic opera Victory Over the Sun (1913), whose creators included Kazimir Malevich. The reference is, however, largely formal. In the rewritten version, the characters have been replaced by members of Brackman’s family, fictional witnesses and historical figures, all of them incarnating different perspectives and reactions to the events. Whereas the original opera adhered to the revolutionary, utopian ideas of the day and propagandised for a better society through severance with the past, here the implication is that the past has to be reclaimed to change the future.